Here are some reports, and here. He did critical work in topics such as fat tails and fractals and his stock as a thinker rose considerably after the financial crisis. Losing Allais, McKenzie, and Mandelbrot in one week is a significant decline in the number of fundamental thinkers.
much enjoyed *The Misbehavior of Markets*.
Damn. He changed my brain, in a good way.
85 somehow seems too young.
The Fractal Geometry of Nature was a great book. When is the last time a mathematician left such an impact on popular culture?
I will run a fractal screensaver in his honor.
He was really awesome man in deed. Steve Keen could never have done me a better service introducing fractals in his behavioural finance classes.
Sure now my background will be fractals too!
Great man in deed.
I doubt it's a rumor–the NY Times is running an obituary too: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot…
I agree, the *The Misbehavior of Markets* was enjoyable
Without Mandelbrot's work, this very blog might not have existed. It was Mandelbrot's work with fractals that led to the error correcting modem. IBM was trying to figure out how to avoid noise on the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) for data transmission over the old phone lines. It was Mandelbrot that figured out you could not avoid the noise, but rather had to checksum the results to make sure that what was received was what was sent. The problem continues to exist in today's internet. There is noise on the lines and ECC works around the problem. Without Mandelbrot's work on fractals and chaos, we would be way behind where we are today with data transmission around the world.
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